Kei Kamara, you are in good company. His astonishing failure to put a ball over the goal line while sliding across said line in the Wizards-Galaxy game Saturday isn't atypical at all of how maddening it can be to score goals in a game fraught with incongruities.

Rankings are all the vogue these days regarding all things MLS, yet in this age of power rankings and other opinion-ridden rankings there's one glaring omission; that of ambition, of zeal, of commitment to spend. Suffice it to say, the expansion of Designated Player options gives license to those teams willing to pay and is one way to measure a team's ambition.

At the U.S. Soccer Development Academy finals last summer at Home Depot Center, I got my first look at a very talented, very young D.C. United player named Andy Najar.

In the last two weeks, MLS has announced an ambitious expansion of its Designated Player option as well as more opportunities, to go along with better salaries, for young players whom teams have brought through their development programs.

There's lots to like yet much to fear about the hiring of former U.S. international Claudio Reyna as youth technical director by U.S. Soccer.

No doubt many players at the lower end of the MLS salary scale greeted the news of more DP slots with more trepidation than excitement. MLS did chop down the salary-budget charges for DPs from $415,000 to $335,000 and will allow teams to "buy down" those cap hits with allocation money, but the modest salary-cap increases written into the recently signed collective-bargaining agreement won't amount to much for the rank-and-file if teams go crazy for DPs. There will still be a squeeze, and in the league's 15 seasons of operation dozens of decent players have been dumped for someone a …

MLS might have kept it simple by simply increasing the number of Designated Players each team can sign from one to two, and also allowing a team the option of using a third DP slot if it so wishes.